madama butterfry

last night i got my first taste of opera at the daegu opera house. my coworkers told me that the opera here is really casual and i didn't need to dress up at all. um, that wasn't quite true. but underdressed or not, it was a good time.


this is the opera house, all lit up at night. the inside reminds me a lot of the hancher auditorium in iowa city and place des arts in montreal. maybe it's all standard.

(three little geishas standing in a row)

i don't know if you all know the story of madame butterfly, but the basic story line is:

sleazy white american soldier (pinkerton) goes to japan, marries a geisha (madame butterfly), leaves her alone for three years, she waits by the window for him to come back, he returns and denies her and her kid, she commits hara kiri.

so last night i watched koreans singing in italian pretending to be american. it was trippy. and to be "american" the koreans sort of died their hair (or wore wigs) a burnt sienna color and kind of curled it a bit. it didn't work for me. i kept having to remind myself, oh yeah, that guy's american. but then when madame butterfly brings out her kid, all the illusion i could muster fell apart. the kid, from the nosebleed seats, didn't have striking korean features, like the large headed lead male character, and he had on an oversized ken-doll floppy blonde wig. pinkerton could have easily denied that the kid was his at all in this case. :)
it was pretty cool overall. the singing was amazing! i wish i could do that! although i didn't have the same reaction as julia roberts in pretty woman. then again, i wasn't wearing that huge diamond necklace. maybe that had something to do with it. and i had forgotten my opera goggles.